"The central objective of this book lies in discovering which part of their enormous canonical and non-canonical literature Korean Buddhist professionals choose to focus on as the required curriculum in their training, and what they elect to leave out. It asks why these texts are chosen, who does the choosing, and how the selected pedagogical programs shape and reflect the way monks and nuns comprehend their religion and their roles within it. It is essentially fashioned as a biography of a curriculum. It centers on the birth, institutionalization, fall, and replacement of the "traditional" Korean Buddhist monastic curriculum over the course of the past five centuries. It illustrates how a particular sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pedagogic program was reimagined in the course of the twentieth century to become the sole unified Korean monastic program, only to be criticized and utterly reformed in the twenty-first. Through a detailed analysis of such modifications, I attempt to demonstrate how Korean Buddhist reformers today tend to imitate the pedagogical practices and canonize the textual totems of the contemporary international discipline of Buddhist studies, and how, by doing so, they ultimately transform Korean Buddhist orthodoxy from a particular kind of Chinese-centered scholastic Chan, to the broad, inclusive, pluralistic, Indian-focused religion we usually find in our English-language introductory textbooks"--

Uri Kaplan is lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.